Antagonista Manifesto

"When injustice becomes law,resistance becomes duty."

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" -- Mario Savio

It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now?

Welcome to Anything that defies my sense of reason.... Class antagonism of a New World Order.

....because words will always retain their power, offer the means to meaning and, for those who'll listen, the enunciation of truth, and because being sleepwalked into fascism is not an option.

To confront ideas that radically alter our perception of the world is one of life's most unsettling yet liberating experiences.

Throw away your ambitions for membership to the socially acceptable position of wage slave.

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; the right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers." -- Article 19

Words of Wisdom

"Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience… Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem." - Howard Zinn

"If the truth can be told in a way so as to be understood, it will be believed." - Terence McKenna

"The eternal fight is not many battles fought on one level but one great battle fought on many different levels." - The Antagonist

"Besides, I think it's time to abolish politicians entirely and let everbody participate in self-government via Internet. We needed representatives in the 18th Century, because we couldn't all go to Washington. Meanwhile, times changed and our "representatives" have sold us out to the corporations, as we in the majority party all agree, whatever our differences in other matters. And we don't need "representatives" anymore; we have the Net technology to represent ourselves." - Robert Anton Wilson

"There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but, in the end, they always fall - think of it. Always." - Mohandas Gandhi

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in times of comfort and convenience, but where he stands in times of challenge and controversy. Cowardice asks the question: Is it safe? Expedience asks the question: Is it politic? Vanity asks the question: Is it popular? But conscience asks the question: Is it right? And a time comes when man must take a stand that’s neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it’s right.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face." — Michel Foucault

"You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world." — Octave Mirbeau

"We have given away far too many freedoms in order to be free. Now it's time to take some back." - John le Carre

“We need to work like the Zapatistas do, like ants who go everywhere no matter which political party the other belongs to. Zapatistas proved people can work together in spite of differences.” - Anna Esther Cecena of the FZLN (Mexican support committee of the Zapatistas)

"Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance." - Albert Einstein

"The problem with always being a conformist is that when you try to change the system from within, it's not you who changes the system; it's the system that will eventually change you." - Immortal Technique

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." - Stephen Bantu Biko

"An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it." - Mohandas Gandhi

"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought". - John F. Kennedy

"There is no general legal duty to assist the police or to obey police instructions." - Rice v Connolly [1966] 2 QB 414

"All great truths begin as blasphemies." - George Bernard Shaw

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." - Albert Einstein

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you... then you win." - Mohandas Gandh

"Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." - George Orwell

"No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance." - Leonard Schapiro

“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.” - Benjamin Franklin

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - Dr. Martin Luther King

"There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at points in history and creating a power that governments cannot suppress." - Howard Zinn

"We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." - George Orwell

"Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage-to move in the opposite direction." - Albert Einstein

"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw

"To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the virtue nor the wisdom to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorised, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolised, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; And to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality." - PJ Proudhon

"It's only subliminal if you don't notice it." - The Antagonist

Public Private Partnership

UK PLC Saving Banks

28 April 2005

Ricin rings in the UK? The Antagonist didn't buy it, nor did anyone else with a sense of reason, realising that it was yet another attempt by government agencies to scare the UK public just enough that they positively relish the soon-to-reappear ID cards bill, fundamental changes in UK law, and a whole host of other infringements of fundamental civil liberties.

Colin Powell does not need more humiliation over the manifold errors in his February 2003 presentation to the UN. But yesterday a London jury brought down another section of the case he made for war - that Iraq and Osama bin Laden were supporting and directing terrorist poison cells throughout Europe, including a London ricin ring.

Yesterday's verdicts on five defendants and the dropping of charges against four others make clear there was no ricin ring. Nor did the "ricin ring" make or have ricin. Not that the government shared that news with us. Until today, the public record for the past three fear-inducing years has been that ricin was found in the Wood Green flat occupied by some of yesterday's acquitted defendants. It wasn't.

The third plank of the al-Qaida-Iraq poison theory was the link between what Powell labelled the "UK poison cell" and training camps in Afghanistan. The evidence the government wanted to use to connect the defendants to Afghanistan and al-Qaida was never put to the jury. That was because last autumn a trial within a trial was secretly taking place. This was a private contest between a group of scientists from the Porton Down military research centre and myself. The issue was: where had the information on poisons and chemicals come from?

The information - five pages in Arabic, containing amateur instructions for making ricin, cyanide and botulinum, and a list of chemicals used in explosives - was at the heart of the case. The notes had been made by Kamel Bourgass, the sole convicted defendant. His co-defendants believed that he had copied the information from the internet. The prosecution claimed it had come from Afghanistan.

I was asked to look for the original source on the internet. This meant exploring Islamist websites that publish Bin Laden and his sympathisers, and plumbing the most prolific source of information on how to do harm: the writings of the American survivalist right and the gun lobby.

The experience of being an expert witness on these issues has made me feel a great deal safer on the streets of London. These were the internal documents of the supposed al-Qaida cell planning the "big one" in Britain. But the recipes were untested and unoriginal, borrowed from US sources. Moreover, ricin is not a weapon of mass destruction. It is a poison which has only ever been used for one-on-one killings and attempted killings.

If this was the measure of the destructive wrath that Bin Laden's followers were about to wreak on London, it was impotent. Yet it was the discovery of a copy of Bourgass's notes in Thetford in 2002 that inspired the wave of horror stories and government announcements and preparations for poison gas attacks.

It is true that when the team from Porton Down entered the Wood Green flat in January 2003, their field equipment registered the presence of ricin. But these were high sensitivity field detectors, for use where a false negative result could be fatal. A few days later in the lab, Dr Martin Pearce, head of the Biological Weapons Identification Group, found that there was no ricin. But when this result was passed to London, the message reportedly said the opposite.

The planned government case on links to Afghanistan was based only on papers that a freelance journalist working for the Times had scooped up after the US invasion of Kabul. Some were in Arabic, some in Russian. They were far more detailed than Bourgass's notes. Nevertheless, claimed Porton Down chemistry chief Dr Chris Timperley, they showed a "common origin and progression" in the methods, thus linking the London group of north Africans to Afghanistan and Bin Laden.

The weakness of Timperley's case was that neither he nor the intelligence services had examined any other documents that could have been the source. We were told Porton Down and its intelligence advisers had never previously heard of the "Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, containing recipes for ricin and much more". The document, written by veterans of the 1980s Afghan war, has been on the net since 1998.

All the information roads led west, not to Kabul but to California and the US midwest. The recipes for ricin now seen on the internet were invented 20 years ago by survivalist Kurt Saxon. He advertises videos and books on the internet. Before the ricin ring trial started, I phoned him in Arizona. For $110, he sent me a fistful of CDs and videos on how to make bombs, missiles, booby traps - and ricin. We handed a copy of the ricin video to the police.

When, in October, I showed that the chemical lists found in London were an exact copy of pages on an internet site in Palo Alto, California, the prosecution gave up on the Kabul and al-Qaida link claims. But it seems this information was not shared with the then home secretary, David Blunkett, who was still whipping up fear two weeks later. "Al-Qaida and the international network is seen to be, and will be demonstrated through the courts over months to come, actually on our doorstep and threatening our lives," he said on November 14.

The most ironic twist was an attempt to introduce an "al-Qaida manual" into the case. The manual - called the Manual of the Afghan Jihad - had been found on a raid in Manchester in 2000. It was given to the FBI to produce in the 2001 New York trial for the first attack on the World Trade Centre. But it wasn't an al-Qaida manual. The name was invented by the US department of justice in 2001, and the contents were rushed on to the net to aid a presentation to the Senate by the then attorney general, John Ashcroft, supporting the US Patriot Act.

To show that the Jihad manual was written in the 1980s and the period of the US-supported war against the Soviet occupation was easy. The ricin recipe it contained was a direct translation from a 1988 US book called the Poisoner's Handbook, by Maxwell Hutchkinson.

We have all been victims of this mass deception. I do not doubt that Bourgass would have contemplated causing harm if he was competent to do so. But he was an Islamist yobbo on his own, not an Al Qaida-trained superterrorist. An Asbo might be appropriate.________________________________________________________

Duncan Campbell is an investigative writer and a scientific expert witness on computers and telecommunications. He is author of War Plan UK and is not the Guardian journalist of the same name.

18 April 2005

It seems like Labour Party HQ have been busy on the domain name registration front in a desperate bid to drum up a little more traffic to their web site from anyone checking out the toryscum.com opposition.

Update: The Antagonist discovered these little factoids entirely by chance while researching the spectre of Hecht, penned this post, and then found this while waiting for a couple of new .gov.uk domain registrations come through.

Two weeks in to the run up to the UK general election, three weeks to go, and The Antagonist has finally got round to adding a living, breathing blogroll to manage the veritable cornucopia of UK Election related links.

"Michael Howard sought to bring immigration and asylum issues to the fore in the election campaign today, blaming failures in government policy for allowing Algerian ricin plotter Kamel Bourgass into Britain."

Around one third of food grown for human consumption in the UK ends up in the rubbish bin, new figures reveal. Statistics from the government and food industry show each adult wastes food to the value of £420 each year.

Changes in people's habits and scares over food safety are helping wastage to increase by 15% every decade, the BBC's Costing the Earth found.

Through the clever use of well-documented predatory pricing, supplier manipulation, and other strong-armed business tactics to close off any viable, local competition, the supermarket cartels are openly generating obscene profits from the bulk manufacture and sale of food that it seems consumers just throw away.

Endless streams of in-store offers of '3 for the price of 2' or '2 for 1' and the occasional mass-produced food safety alert make overconsumption the default activity in supermarkets. This enforced overconsumption tactic of standard supermarket practices is now producing huge profits for the supermarket chains, huge amounts of waste, and huge costs to the safety, vitality, and the diversity of the food we eat and the local communities in which we live.

To date the onus has been on local communities to justify why they have no desire for a supermarket to be installed somewhere in the vicinity of a thriving community.

Until this process is reversed, and the onus is placed on the supermarket chains to plead their case to local communities, consumers are left with little other option than to vote with their feet and stay out of the supermarkets that actively encourage this hideous waste to occur.

Congratulations to Dell Computers for leaping unashamedly onto The Antagonist's corporate scams radar with their superb coffer-boosting efforts of hijacking a few extra pounds from unwitting consumers at the point of sale.

It would be very difficult not to spot at least some of the glut of advertising that Dell fills the world with these days, and a reader ('H', here-on in) of the Antagonist's musings, who happened to be in the market for a new PC, was no different. Inspired by a glossy, colour photograph of a fully-fledged, multimedia Dell PC, flatscreen and speaker combo, 'H' telephoned Dell to place an order.

During the conversation that ensued, the Dell representative advised that the system did not contain a sound card and that one could be fitted at an additional cost of UKP34. According to the representative, the extra expenditure would allow 'H' to "make full use of the system" and, of course, full use of the speakers that were so prominently displayed in the glossy advert that inspired 'H' to order.

So, Dell advertises what appears to be a multimedia PC, along with the price for that multimedia PC, and then tells anyone that tries to order it that they need to spend more money to get the multimedia functionality that is implied by the glossy marketing literature.

Rather unsubtly, the idea here is to exploit the fact that anyone spending the best part of UKP1000 on a PC isn't going to balk at the marginal cost of an extra UKP40 to get the implied functionality. The deal is, if you want to actually listen to the CDs and DVDs that a new Dell system will allow you to play through the speakers shown in their adverts, you have to pay more than the advertised price of that implied functionality.

The Antagonist believes that this is a highly spurious business practice and constitutes entirely misleading advertising.

Further, if you were to take this practice to its logical extension, Dell would be selling empty computer cases, screens and speakers, as shown in the glossy adverts, and then getting customers who call up to order to fill these redundant boxes with other random component parts - like motherboards, CPUs, and graphics cards, all at extra cost - so 'H' and other consumers can then "make full use of the system" displayed.

Researchers at the Antagonist Twin Towers are very interested to know how many other people have experienced this sort of unscrupulous practice at the hands of Dell...

Reports of Internet transfer rates of "billion bits a second" and how "consumers could download an entire HD movie in about five minutes vs. today's 22 minutes."

Whatever evil spins the media corporates try and put on p2p or filesharing, even a click and a whopping 22 minutes to download a film wins hands down when compared to paying to sit on hold to a call centre for 22 minutes to pre-order tickets to a film - complete with additional booking fee for the privilege, of course - for which you still have to queue, possibly for another 22 minutes, to pick up when you've braved the elements and travelled, perhaps 22 or so more minutes, to get to wherever it is the film is showing. Then, after about 22 more minutes of adverts and general fluff that most of us could happily live without, along comes your film.

The Antagonist will return soon with some clever statistics involving the numbers 9,000 (total law suits to date) and 400,000,000 (number of peer to peer users worldwide) just as soon as the abacus has been exponentially upgraded.

10 April 2005

Freedom of expression is a good thing in the mind of The Antagonist, who lives in a place where the press purports to be free and yet which, in the majority of cases, only serves to limit the bounds of acceptable opinion and discussion.

“EDUCATION, education, education” was Tony B.Liar's election war cry of 1997. He probably mentioned it a few times in 2001 but I don't recall and, for once, I can't be bothered to look it up. Suffice to say, in 1997, it was the election slogan, even though all it is is meaningless reptition of the same thing, over and over again.

Today, in the early stages of the 2005 farc... election, Tony B.Liar was seen to be sweating it a bit, in the style of Charles Kennedy during his speech last year, as he appeared before his Sedgefield constituency to outline something or other in the run up to May 5th, the day before his birthday.

Surrounded by numerous Labour Party "forward not back" slogans, and with no sense of irony, sarcasm or humour, Tony B.Liar leapt firmly forward not back to 1997 and announced his party's new commitment to, er, “EDUCATION, education, education”.

In a speech to tens of thousands of Iraqis in Baghdad on the second anniversary of the city's fall to the Americans, Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr demanded US troops leave Iraq.

According to the story, Christians and students also paraded around the square with banners chanting "No! No to terrorism!" and "No! No to America!" in support of Sadr's call for national unity:

"Bush, you said the world is safer now. Bush I tell you maybe America is safer but the rest of the world is more dangerous. Why are you dismantling the weapons of our resistance and you permit Israel to have nuclear arms.

"Why are you waging war against Islam, and at the same time supporting the Jews. We don't want your security. We don't want anything good or bad from you, we want you to leave us alone."

-- * Iraq: The, "stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history," and, “a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination,” as the region was described by Britain in 1947.

09 April 2005

By some strange twist of bureaucratic planning, it was All Fool's Day 1999 when the BBC News web site proclaimed the future of Rover's Longbridge plant had been secured following a deal between the Government and Rover's German parent company BMW. The 'deal' involved UK taxpayers handing over £UK200 million to BMW, the private, foreign owners of Rover - a fact about which Tony B.Liar was "delighted" as he looked forward to a "world class plant for the next century".

As his is his won't in his bouts of non-specific political verbosity, Tone neglected to mention quite how far into the next century he expected this world class plant to last and, just six years later, Rover has finally collapsed amid questions about £200m of cash and assets missing from Rover's published accounts.

Today it looks like the four directors of Phoenix Venture Holdings who have managed to pay themselves in excess of UK£30 million since buying Rover for UK£10 from BMW in May 2000, may be required to meet some of the cost of the £400 million shortfall which has appeared in the company’s pension fund.

Chancellor Gordon Brown said:

"There will obviously be inquiries into what has happened in Rover since the deal with BMW. I think we can look at all the consequences of what has happened in the past at a later date."

Alternatively, Gordon, we could look into all the consequence of what has happened now, while the government and people responsible are still officially in charge and while it's still relevant to workers at Longbridge.

No, not an attempted fake-bomb-re-delivery on the day of the Royal Wedding, but an update regarding the inquiry into the Windsor Castle incident earlier this week where a journalist drove a van carrying a fake 'bomb' past Windsor Castle security and into the site of today's wedding between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles.

As the fake 'bomb' was cunningly disguised in brown box, clearly labelled 'BOMB', and was delivered in a heavily graffiti'd and rather suspect looking van, the inquiry has deemed that the two Royal Protection Group police officers responsible for allowing entry be moved from their duties to "non firearms commands", and other tasks hopefully less challenging than spotting the bloody obvious.

07 April 2005

One in the eye for those worried about the prospect of chip implants - brain manipulation without the requirement for an implant.

Not content with creating artificial desires in people via old fashioned senses like sight, sound and smell (so 'last century'), those boys at Sony obtained a patent which speaks of technology to stimulate brain activity via ultrasound, thereby creating sensory experiences such as moving images, tastes and sounds.

"A non-invasive system and process for projecting sensory data onto the human neural cortex.... Changes in the neural firing timing induce various sensory experiences, depending on the location...the system induces recognizable sensory experiences by applying ultrasonic energy in one or more selected patterns on one or more selected locations of the cortex."

Suddenly, all those people wearing tin-foil hats don't seem quite so silly after all.

01 April 2005

Washington, DC - The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) this week announced that its litigation campaign against American filesharers will now end. Explained RIAA President Cory Shoreman, "In short, we sued 'em all. All 70 million, plus their parents, grandmothers, and roommates, have been properly brought to heel, for settlements ranging from between $3,000 and their entire net worth."

Shoreman continued, "The only logical result is that a properly chastened nation will now herd - peacefully, without protest - into the local malls to purchase from dusty, bulging shelves a dozen copies each of $18 Ashley Simpson copy-protected CDs."

"Why a dozen? Why, one CD for every RIAA-designed, government-approved listening device, of course! And then on top of that you've got to buy duplicates for back-ups in case any of them get scratched."

Twirling his moustachios and straightening his top hat, Shoreman chortled, "And they said the recording industry would never adjust to the Internet era!"

Nail A Nobody™

Thanks to the Conspiraloon™ Alliance laboratories, you can now Ruin Those You Resent without leaving your personal computer!

Enter the person you wish to inform on:

Select transgression:

Who would you like to be informed?

Antagonista Zeitgeist

"The country's biggest force, the Metropolitan police || believe that large sections of the population have become increasingly politicised, and there is a growing sense that the current restrictions on demonstrations are too light." - The Guardian

"The bombers scattered identity and bank cards around the Tube carriages they targeted before placing their rucksacks on the floor and setting off the explosives. || Although they were damaged to some extent, they [the ID and bank cards] did not show the damage that would be expected if they were on the body of the bomber or in the rucksack, suggesting that in each case they had been deliberately separated by some distance from the actual explosion. || The bombers were not wearing the rucksacks at the time of the explosions, but had instead put them down on the floor of the bus and Tube trains." - The Telegraph

"But it [de Menezes execution MPS trial] was nearly derailed after an armed police raid on the home of a juror's ex-boyfriend in the second week of the case, in which the female juror's baby was taken away." - Daily Mail

"It is no exaggeration to say that at the time of the arrest there was not one shred of admissible evidence against Barot. The arrest was perfectly lawful - there were more than sufficient grounds, but in terms of evidence to put before a court, there was nothing. There then began the race against time to retrieve evidence from the mass of computers and other IT equipment that we seized. It was only at the very end of the permitted period of detention that sufficient evidence was found to justify charges. I know that some in the media were sharpening their pencils, and that if we had been unable to bring charges in that case, there would have been a wave of criticism about the arrests. Barot himself of course eventually pleaded guilty last year and received a 40-year sentence." – DAC Peter Clarke

The 7/7 narrative: "06.49: The 4 men .... each put on rucksacks || 07:14: .... The 4 then put on their rucksacks...." More....

"The [21/7] jury were told a further charge of conspiracy to cause explosions likely to endanger life, faced by each man, was now being left off the indictment." – BBC

"Tony Blair and his family suffered the indignity of having to sleep on the floor and eat an Indian takeaway out of foil cartons on their last night in Downing Street, insiders have revealed." – The Times